


dug a hole inside my heart

by tsunderestorm



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Crimson Flower Route, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21698215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsunderestorm/pseuds/tsunderestorm
Summary: They find Felix in the mud.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 6
Kudos: 49





	dug a hole inside my heart

**Author's Note:**

> _dug a hole inside my heart  
>  to put you in your grave  
> at this point it was you or me  
> mama didn’t raise no slave_  
>    
> I could visualize this scene so perfectly in my head, I had to write it.

They find Felix in the mud. In the mud and the piss and the shit and the stink of corpses and gore strewn all over the ground, they find him drenched in blood.

None of it is his. 

Some of it is their enemies’. 

Most of it is Dimitri’s.

(Although, they suppose, Dimitri _had_ died an enemy, hadn’t he?)

Felix is huddled beside Dimitri’s corpse, almost entirely beneath his cloak and curled in a mockery of a lover’s embrace under the stiff arm of a man he’d once called _friend,_ maybe someone he could have called _lover_ had war not ravaged the world. The familiar blue cloak is near-black with blood spatter and soaked from the rain, and they don’t even think Felix realizes that he’s shivering so hard his teeth clack together.

“I was born for him,” he spits acidly when they kneel beside him and the king he turned his back on. There’s venom in his voice, but it’s thick with things he’s not saying. Any further vitriol lying in wait just beyond his tongue turns sticky and sour and he visibly swallows it back, whispers, “Born for the boar.”

Byleth says nothing. What is there to say? There is a bubble of… _something_ , in their chest, things they might call _regret_ or _empathy_ if they had proper emotions, maybe something like _pity_. There is something so pathetic about Felix, devoid of swords and belts, sheltered from the cold and damp under the arm of what used to be Dimitri. 

“I was the first Fraldarius to ever leave their Blaiddyd, and he’s dead,” Felix says, rubbing filthy, gloved hands in vain against his red-rimmed eyes. “Dead for revenge. What a stupid way to go. Did he change anything? _No_.”

Byleth reaches to touch him, and Felix bats them away, shrinking so Dimitri’s mortal wound is starkly visible. He Has a crater in the shape of Aymr in his chest, cavernous and raw, black with his spilled lifeblood and Felix’s head rests beside it, cheek down against a chest where a heart used to beat. Areadbhar lays discarded beside them, a sickly pink with rain-diluted blood in the morning light, pale and sallow. A bone from a corpse, its crest stone as dead and glassy as its wielder’s icy eye. 

“Could I have saved him?” Felix asks. Byleth says nothing, just watches the way Felix’s fingers move around the injury that had ended Dimitri’s life, flaking crusts of dried blood off and methodically picking pieces of ripped fabric out of the wound. A piece of battered armor slices his finger and he winces, but does not withdraw it, letting it drip onto Dimitri’s ruined chest. Perhaps an homage, perhaps an insult. 

“... could I have stopped him?”

Byleth shakes their head when Felix looks over his shoulder, sighing and squeezing his eyes shut against the sunrise running against the trees like fresh watercolor.

“He wouldn’t listen to anyone. Not Edelgard, not you, no one. But me… maybe,” he scoffs. “Probably not.”

He heaves a sigh, himself from the sopping wet cling of the cape, and rising to kneel beside the stiffening corpse whose protection was his birthright. “He’s not worth it,” Felix says as he rises to his feet on trembling legs, coltish and unsteady, half-asleep from hours lying stationary. “I won’t mourn him.”

(He will, but he’ll do it in private, with his sword battering training dummies until they bleed downy stuffing; with his fists beating weakly against Sylvain’s chest until the tears flow free and true, with his face cradled in Annette’s gentle hands as she composes him a lullaby to ward off the nightmares that will inevitably come.)

“I chose my path when I joined you, Professor,” Felix reasons. “Not my father’s, not a Shield’s, not a prodigy knight’s younger brother, some second best. _Mine._ What I felt for the boar… for Dimitri… is gone. He’s here dead, and I’m alive.”

Small deaths, Byleth reasons; another casualty the sweet boy they’ve heard Felix was before Glenn died at Duscur, like the death of another part of his soul as he buries something else in the graveyard in his heart, the one he denies exists even as he’s tending it, pulling weeds out of plots and wiping headstones clean.

Felix buries his Dimitri on the Tailtean Plains, wipes his sword clean, and sheaths it, and walks away without a second glance, but Byleth sees the tiniest piece of wet, ruined blue fabric tucked neatly into his sword belt. 

**Author's Note:**

> I am [tsunderestorm](twitter.com/tsunderestorm) on twitter ♥


End file.
